The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (14 page)

‘That’s hardly enough to launch a murder enquiry,’ Duguid scoffed.

‘No, sir. It’s not. But it’s not a normal thing to find in a suicide note. Generally speaking the last thing these people are doing is thinking about the impact of their
actions on others. I think we need to consider the possibility that these two suicides are connected. I’d like DS Laird and DC MacBride to reopen the Mikhailevic case, combine the two investigations. Just in case there’s some sort of suicide pact going on. You know, like happened down in Wales a few years back?’

Duguid fell silent. Were it not for the drumming of rain on the window, McLean felt sure he could have heard the cogs turning slowly in the acting superintendent’s brain. He stood still, hands clasped behind his back, almost at attention. Said nothing while he waited. No point rushing a decision out of Dagwood; you’d only end up regretting it.

‘Not Grumpy Bob, no,’ Duguid said eventually. ‘He’s part of Spence’s team on the Braid Hill investigation. Technically MacBride is too. You want to look into this suicide so desperately, do it yourself.’

Ah yes, the notorious Braid Hill flasher. Not seen since the students went down for the summer holidays. Just the sort of high-profile, manpower-hungry investigation that needed a detective inspector, a detective sergeant and a detective constable to pursue. Nothing to do with the fact that a certain acting superintendent lived just across the road from the last reported sighting.

‘What about DS Ritchie?’

‘What about her? She’s busy.’

‘You’ve got her running the evidence store, sir. She’s an experienced detective sergeant. She transferred down here from Aberdeen to help with investigations, not piss around in the stores. It’s bad enough you being shifted to admin without losing anyone else from CID. We’re short enough as it is.’

Duguid looked up suddenly at McLean’s words, sharp enough to catch the veiled compliment, searching for the joke but not finding it.

‘What about the evidence store? We need someone with half a brain to run it.’

‘Bring Tam Ferrers out of retirement, or Pete Dundas. He made enough noise about having to quit before his time anyway.’

Duguid’s stare narrowed as he considered the idea, as if his hatred for McLean was warring with the realization that it was a sensible suggestion. McLean decided it was time to play his trump card.

‘If you bring an ex-copper back in on contract, it’s a direct cost, sir. You can run it through the admin budget rather than payroll.’ Not as if he’d wasted a morning discussing it with Heather in HR.

‘Very well.’ Duguid gave his head the lightest of nods. ‘You can break the news to her yourself. And set up something with Human Resources to get a replacement in.’

Of course, because it’s every detective inspector’s job to sort out the station’s admin staff needs. McLean nodded back in acknowledgement, turned to leave.

‘And McLean.’

‘Sir?’ He didn’t turn around.

‘I want this done by the sergeants and constables. Use PC Gregg or someone else from uniform. There’s plenty wanting a shot at being a detective. None of your hands-on, sticking your nose in everywhere stuff. You’re an inspector now. You manage the investigations. Direct. Leave the grunt-work to those on a lower pay scale.’

‘Sir.’ Another nod. McLean ground his hands into fists
and willed himself calm. He left the office without another word, closed the door firmly behind him. He’d got what he wanted; it was just a shame it had come at such a high cost.

‘I don’t know what you did to get me out of there, sir, but I owe you big time.’

Detective Sergeant Kirsty Ritchie sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs in the CID room, leaning back against the wall. She’d only been in the evidence store a week, but already she had taken on the pale and unhealthy pallor of those who dwelled underground.

‘Me? I didn’t do anything.’ McLean feigned ignorance as he set to cleaning the scribbled notes of a long-abandoned investigation from the whiteboards that filled one wall of the room. He thought he’d been clever, stopping by the major incident room and nicking a whiteboard eraser and a handful of pens, but time had welded the ink in place. Now he was doing his best with a damp cloth he’d found in amongst the detritus around the coffee machine in the far corner of the room. He suspected it was meant for drying up mugs. If so, no one had explained to the detectives who used the place that they were supposed to wash them first.

‘That’s not what I heard. And there’s no way Dagwood could’ve come up with the idea of bringing back Sergeant Dundas from his retirement.’

‘And yet there it is. His own idea, fully formed and costed in his head.’ McLean polished a coffee smear from the now usable whiteboard and took a step back. Where to start? He took a red marker pen out of his pocket and
wrote ‘Grigori Mikhailevic’ in capital letters at the top. Pulling out another pen, blue this time, he reached across to write the next name a couple of feet away. Paused.

‘The second hanging. What was his name again? Paul Sanders? Pete?’

Ritchie dropped her seat back down, pulled the folder off the desk beside her. ‘Patrick Sands. Twenty-five years old. Works in a call centre off Leith Walk. Studying part time for his banking exams.’ She gave a little snort of disbelief. ‘I didn’t even know there was such a thing.’

‘Every day’s a good day when you learn something new.’ McLean wrote the name down and stepped back again. So far the only thing linking these two was the fact that they were both written on this board here in the CID room. Now all they had to do was fill in the big blank space between them.

‘Where do we start?’ Ritchie asked, standing beside him now. She had the Mikhailevic file in one hand, tapped the corner of it lightly against her chin. McLean caught that slight whiff of perfume off her and realized he’d not smelled it for a while now. Duguid had done a fine job of ripping his team apart.

‘There’s a list of Mikhailevic’s friends and co-workers in there.’ He pointed at the folder. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not long. Contact them all and see if any of them know Sands.’

‘I’ll get on it. What have we got on Sands so far?’

McLean picked up the other folder, slimmer even than the one Ritchie was holding. ‘Bugger all. Name, place of work. Not much else. MacBride did what he could, but he’s got a lot else to deal with.’

‘He going to be helping us with this one?’

McLean let out a long sigh. ‘It would make sense. He was the first detective at both scenes. But like I said, Mike Spence has got him running around after every call that comes in. And Dagwood said no. See if you can get PC Gregg to help, or one of the other more resourceful uniforms.’

Ritchie gave him a sceptical look. ‘What about Grumpy Bob?’

‘Did I hear someone calling my name?’

McLean and Ritchie both turned at the same time, narrowly avoiding a nasty collision. Grumpy Bob stood in the doorway, a newspaper tucked under one arm, coffee mug in the opposite hand. Little tendrils of steam wafted off the top, bringing a warm, rich aroma to the room. Not from the canteen then.

‘Morning, Bob. You still working that burglary case?’

‘Got the little toerag down in the cells as we speak, sir. Can you believe he tried to flog some of his ill-gotten gains across the road.’ Grumpy Bob nodded towards the window in an approximation of the direction of the pub used almost exclusively by police officers just off their shift.

‘Surely nobody’s that stupid,’ Ritchie said.

‘You’ve not been in Edinburgh long, lass. We take pride in the idiocy of our petty criminals.’ Grumpy Bob dropped his newspaper onto his desk, pulled out the chair and sat down. He took a long slurp of coffee, staring at the whiteboard all the while.

‘Mikhailevic. That’s the chappy hanged himself, aye?’

McLean nodded.

‘And Wee Paddy Sands would be the one we had to scrape up off of his own floor yesterday.’

McLean resisted the urge to ask who Bob thought ‘we’ was in this statement, since as far as he was aware, the detective sergeant had kept well away from the clean-up operation. ‘That’s the one.’

‘What makes you think there’s a connection?’

‘Come on, Bob. Two hangings in quick succession? Similar profile to the two victims? The same phrase used in both suicide notes?’

‘The same rope, too.’ Grumpy Bob grinned and for a moment, McLean was a wet-behind-the-ears detective constable again.

‘You noticed that.’

‘I noticed that, aye. And it’s not just any old rope either. Good solid hemp, three-quarter inch thick. You got photos in those folders?’ Grumpy Bob pushed himself out of his seat like a much younger man, reaching for the reports. He shuffled through the first one, coming out with a couple of glossy sheets, stuck them to the whiteboard under Mikhailevic. By the time he’d finished, Ritchie had done the same for Sands. McLean stood back, watching them at work.

‘You’ll only get that at a ship’s chandler’s.’ Grumpy Bob tapped at one of the photographs showing a close-up of the rope still tight around the victim’s neck. The second picture was just the rope laid out, the knot still tight. ‘There’s only a couple in the city, probably worth paying them a visit.’

‘While you’re at it, see if you can find an expert on knots,’ McLean said. The two sergeants stopped what they were doing.

‘Knots?’ Grumpy Bob asked.

‘Knots. Yes. I don’t know much about them. Sure I couldn’t tie one of those hangman’s nooses, but they look very similar to me. Everything else is circumstantial so far, but if we can show that these two knots were tied by the same person …’ McLean let the sentence go unfinished, stared at the two photographs, that all too familiar chill forming in his gut as the implications of what he was seeing started to build.

16

McLean found Jo Dexter at her desk, poring over some photographs that would almost certainly get anyone else arrested, should they be found in their possession. It looked like she was comparing images to see if the same child appeared in more than one. The scowl on her face when she looked up as he knocked at the door showed just how little she enjoyed the task.

‘Thought you were coming in earlier,’ she said by way of greeting.

‘I was, but I had to go and see his majesty first. Seems I’m now working Vice and Homicide. It’s a good thing I don’t need to sleep.’

Dexter tried to smile at the joke, but it didn’t really sit well with the job she’d been doing. Everyone referred to the Sexual Crimes Unit as Vice, except the poor bastards working there. Nothing glamorous about dealing with paedophiles and rapists day in and day out. Never mind the prostitution and all its associated ills.

‘Still buggered sideways till Tuesday?’

‘Something like that. I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to put Dagwood in charge, but they’d better make a decision soon about a permanent station head.’

‘What if they decide to give it to him?’

McLean looked at the DCI’s face, searching for any
hint that she was joking. Finding none. ‘They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Could they?’

‘They thought he was good enough to fill in.’

‘Yes, but that was just temporary. I mean, Jayne had to move out sharpish when …’

Now the smile, a wicked cracking around the eyes. It was a tired one though, as if the possibility of Superintendent Charles Duguid, not acting, was too terrible even for the darkest of comedies.

‘What’s he got you working on then?’ Dexter shuffled the photographs back into a pile, pushed them into a brown folder where she wouldn’t have to look at the one on top. At least not for now. McLean told her about the two suicides by hanging, DC MacBride’s initial suspicions and the anomalies that had come to light after just a brief investigation.

‘I can see why he’s not happy throwing a lot of manpower at it,’ Dexter said after a while. ‘I mean, it sounds suspicious to me, but in the end it’s a couple of lonely blokes with no prospects both deciding to top themselves the same way. You’ll probably find there’s been a documentary about a hangman on the telly recently. Something like that. Just bad luck it struck a chord with both of them.’

McLean rubbed at his eyes. ‘Thanks for the support.’

‘Hey. I’m just saying. You may be right.’ Dexter held her hands up in surrender. ‘Anyways, I’m guessing that’s not what you came to chat about.’

‘No, I was wondering where we were with Malky Jennings. I missed the morning briefing.’

‘Wouldn’t’ve made any difference if you’d been there.
Nothing’s changed. We’ve as much chance of catching whoever did him as I have of making Detective Super. Acting or no.’

‘Interviews all done?’

‘Aye. Every single apartment in that square. Even the ones that look out the other way. Half the folk living there are on the dole. They’d’ve been in all day watching telly. Or stoned out of their heads. Nobody saw a bloody thing.’

‘And he was killed somewhere else, dumped in the night?’

‘That’s what the SOCOs and your pathologist friend think. Beaten to death with a stick or a bat and then thrown into the garbage pile at the back of the lock-ups. No real surprise he was there; half his pros live in those apartments.’